All Just a Dream: Difference between revisions

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Around fifty minutes into the program, really weird stuff starts happening, like little people juggling while riding a tricycle around a bewildered protagonist. Then the protagonist realizes, just as you do, that this has all been a dream, a really bad hallucination, or some other escape from reality.

 

{{endingtrope}}

{{examples}}

== Advertising ==

* Don't forget the Pepsi Twist commercial when [[Ozzy Osbourne]] notices his kids drinking Pepsis, only for them to actually be Pepsi Twists, and that his kids are actually the ''Osmonds'' in [[Latex Perfection|full rubber bodysuits]]. Ozzy starts screaming, only to wake up and realize that it was just a nightmare, though the Pepsi Twists are still real...

 

* One of the DVD specials for ''[[Durarara!!]]'' cleverly inverts this trope. The opening scenes show downright absurd scenes, like UFO sightings. As these are shown, Walter muses that most people would call his fantasies a pipe dream. The rest of the episode is narrated chronologically backwards, revealing that the strange occurrences at the beginning of the episode are ''not'' part of Walter's fantasy.

* The Season 2 opening of ''[[Genshiken]]'' starts with Sasahara opening a book... and then goes into an opening for a Mobile Suit Gundam-like series starring the Genshiken characters, including a helmeted Madarame as the antagonist. Then Sasahara wakes up and we see that he was looking at a sketch of the club members.

** In the un-animated skit ''High School Girls are Funky -- Tolerance'', {{spoiler|[[Always Second Best|Yanagin]] again dared NAGO to test how long can they stay in the sauna. While most of the skit showed Yanagin won over NAGO... it turned out Yanagin fell unconscious earlier than NAGO, Ikushima and Habara; what we saw for the previous pages were just her dream while she was unscious.}}

 

* The last issue of ''[[Gen 13]]'', vol. 1 combined this with a [[Downer Ending]]: The team—along with various other gen-active teens they'd met along the course of the series—has one last hedonistic, live-like-there's-no-tomorrow-cuz-there-ain't good time before "The End". Turns out this was all in Caitlin Fairchild's head, an extended hallucination brought on by the effects of another gen-active's powers in the split-second before a [[Death Trap]] disintegrated them all (they got better).

* This has happened innumerable times in [[Superhero]] comics as an "out" for a wacky story that doesn't fit into canon. So much so that it was common to include the blurb "Not a dream! Not an imaginary story!" on covers to reassure readers that no such cop-out would be used. Of course, since [[Covers Always Lie]], they'd usually find some ''other'' cop-out that meant the events still weren't what they seemed.

* ''[[Tom Strong]]'' issues 29 & 30 had the eponymous hero awaken from his superheroic life into a gray world with no wonder or adventure where he was just a factory worker with a case of bad self-esteem. Then the clues mount that he really is a superhero - only to discover that he was a failed military experiment and [[Cuckoo Nest|all of his memories of a heroic life were delusions]]. But at the last moment, he breaks out of the hallucination - back into the superheroic world where the [[Big Bad]] of the story had been forcing him to hallucinate. He said later that he knew the world he had been in wasn't real because it was all gray, with no sense of hope or wonder in it. (Of course, a cynical person might just say that he was unable to cope with the truth and retreated into his dream-world ... à la that much-referenced episode of ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''.)

* ''[[The Sandman]]''. Quite a bit of it really is just a dream, but that doesn't make it any less real. "I give you - [[wikipedia:List of characters in The Sandman#Alex Burgess|eternal waking]]..." Brrrrr...

* Two ''[[Spawn]]'' issues written by [[Neil Gaiman]] and [[Grant Morrison]] has Spawn dying accidentally after a fight with an angel warrior, and goes to a special level of Hell, where he finds all [[Marvel Comics]] and [[DC Comics]] superheroes imprisoned, and with help of [[Lawyer-Friendly Cameo|Superman]], who gave him his power, he sets them all free. Next issue happens back on Earth, with the narrator saying "Let's come back to reality. Spawn has a bad dream last days."

* Sometimes used as a [[Cold Opening]] in ''[[Quantum and Woody]]''. For example, issue #5 starts with Woody, Quantum, and Amy working together as a tightly-coordinated counter-terrorism team to stop a criminal called Othello. In reality, it's a dream induced after Quantum was accidentally blasted off of a building in the previous issue.

* A story of ''[[The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers]]'' from the early '70s has the trio staging a violent assault on a prison to free an incarcerated friend. Fat Freddy ends up cut off and bludgeoned to death by a horde of cops - but it's all just a dream, and Franklin is beating him with a rolled-up newspaper for eating a whole batch of hash cookies. Then, some seven years later, an extended story where they take a cross-country trip in a vintage RV ends in a full-scale riot at a Greenwich Village Halloween parade - but it's all just a dream, and Franklin is beating Freddy with a rolled-up newspaper...implying ''everything'' that happened between the two stories was Fat Freddy dreaming!

 

== Fan Works ==

* In ''[[Nobody Dies]]'', {{spoiler|much of chapter 66 is Shinji having a dream (really more of a nightmare) about Zeruel slaughtering everyone.}}

* [[Inverted Trope]] in ''[[Kyon: Big Damn Hero]]'', where Kanae was having a recurrent dream with parts... off. It was until after {{spoiler|she kissed Kyon}} that she realized she was awake.

* The ''[[Star Trek: Phase II]]'' episode "To Serve All My Days", involving a delayed effect of [[Rapid Aging]] that afflicts Chekov to the point where he may have died, {{spoiler|in the final scene following the closing credits suggests that most of the whole episode was just a dream he had}}.

* [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6515261/7/Dalton Chapter 7] of ''[[Dalton]]'' starts out like this.

 

* Some have suggested that the events of ''[[The Polar Express]]'' were all just a dream, though others feel that the presence of the bell from Santa's sleigh as a present for the Hero Boy signifies that they were really real.

* Poor poor ''[[An American Tail|Fievel Goes West]]'', written off as a dream Fievel had in the third ''An American Tail'' movie. Which is a headbanger [[Retcon]] as there was an entire TV series with the Wild West theme that aired prior to the third movie. What, was Fievel in a coma or something? The dream lasted a whole TV series!

* ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'' is the most famous film example, of course, though there is a ''wee'' bit of room for alternate interpretation. It should be noted that in the book it is definite that Oz '''was''' real and Dorothy returns there several times in other books; Oz was changed to an elaborate dream in the film because producers [[Viewers are Morons|felt that the 1930s audience was too sophisticated to accept a straight on fantasy like that]].

* Two of Laurel and Hardy's short films used this example: ''The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case'' and ''Oliver the Eighth''.

* Reality and dreams are blurred in ''[[The Science of Sleep]]''.

* ''Stay (1996)''

* Subverted in ''[[The Butterfly Effect]]''. At one point near the end of the film it looks like the story is gonna go out with a [[Twist Ending]]. As Evan's doctor explains that there are no journals, he asserts that everything that we've apparantly seen so far is a delusion that Evan created to cope with the guilt of killing Kayleigh, describing alternate universes with colleges, prisons, and paraplegia. Then it turns out that the mental time travel ''was'' real when Evan goes back one last time.

* ''[[The Descent (film)|The Descent]]''. Did the crawlers exist, or was Sarah unable to handle the claustrophobia and stress of the already bad situation, causing her to imagine them and kill all her friends? All that can actually be said is that there was dreaming going on; where it started or ended is never made clear. (Their existence is confirmed in the sequel.)

* The first twenty minutes of the ''[[Halloween (film)|Halloween]] II'' remake ends up being nothing more than a nightmare that the main character was having.

* The last third of ''[[Repo Men]]'' - {{spoiler|in the last two minutes or so, it's revealed that Remy suffered brain damage from getting hit in the face by a hook, and Jake then had Remy hooked up to the M5 Neural Net to live the rest of his life in happiness - everything that happens between the hook to the face and the reveal is part of the happy illusion Remy is living because of the neural net.}}

 

== Literature ==

** Speaking of Dickens, this is also one interpretation of ''[[A Christmas Carol]],'' though Scrooge doesn't think so.

* An in-story example occurs in one of the ''Henry Huggins'' books where Henry has to play the lead in the school Christmas program about a boy going to the North Pole to visit Santa. He hates the role- a six-year-old boy, the costume- footy pajamas, and the ending- where it turns out he dreamed the whole thing. [[Beverly Cleary]] didn't seem to like this trope, either.

* [[Mark Twain]]'s ''[[The Mysterious Stranger]]'' [[Nietzsche Wannabe|plays with this]].

* Chris van Allsburg's ''Just a Dream'', obviously. Although whether or not the author intended the dreams to be actual premonitions of potential futures is debatable.

* [[Alexander Pushkin]]'s short story ''The Undertaker'' is an [[Older Than Radio]] example.

* [[The Box of Delights]] ends this way. The action supposedly takes place during Kay Harker's school holidays, but at the end he wakes up still on the train.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* ''[[The X-Files]]'' is fond of doing this.

** In one episode, Mulder and Scully have [[Lotus Eater Machine|fungus-inspired hallucinations]].

** Another One involves Al taking a job as a janitor for a Private Eye only to become one himself and solve a diamond case, getting a big fat check as reward. Of course, [[Status Quo Is God]] and it was just a dream of his (this one was the season-erasing resolution).

** Another has Al making a deal with the Devil (Robert Englund) to lead a football team to the Super Bowl. He gets his wish but is killed in a tackle and taken to Hell where his family and friends also end up (as a result of improbable accidents after his death, oddly enough). After three hundred years in Hell, Al can't take it anymore and challenges the Devil to a football match. The Devil picks some of the world's worst historical figures for his team. Al manages to win (even though given an offer to go back with beautiful women and loads of cash which, in a rare moment selflessness, he passes up). Al then wakes up back where he was before the Devil appeared and it appears to be a dream to him... least until he pulls out some Red Hots candy the Devil had given him.

* This trope's application in the ''[[Newhart]]'' episode "The Last Newhart" resulted in what is widely considered one of the best series [[Grand Finale|finales]], ever. In the end it was revealed that the entire show was a nightmare of Robert Hartley, the star of ''[[The Bob Newhart Show]]'', also played by Bob Newhart. Interestingly, ''[[The Bob Newhart Show]]'' received a crossover from ''[[St. Elsewhere]]'', which combined with the previous entry could make ''[[Newhart]]'' a [[Dream Within a Dream]].

** If that's true, explain {{spoiler|the parody at the end of his 1995 episode of ''[[Saturday Night Live]]''.}} Was that a [[Dream Within a Dream]], too?

** Used as a bit of a fake-out in season 6's {{spoiler|Lana/Lex wedding. The episode begins with a ridiculously melodramatic wedding/murder/suicide scene, which is immediately revealed to be a dream. The rest of the episode tells the story out of order chronologically, with many of the scenes using the same lurid gothic style, faking the viewers out into thinking these scenes are ''also'' just a dream; unfortunately, ''none'' of them are. Instead, when the episode is over and no-one wakes up from the terrible dream, the viewer is left with the slow, horrible realization that the gothic awfulness ''actually happened''.}}

* An episode of ''[[MacGyver]]'' in which the title character dreams of his [[Identical Grandson|lookalike ancestor]] ends with an [[Or Was It a Dream?]] moment when he woke to find he now possessed his ancestor's distinctive pocketknife.

** The episode "They Call It Potsie Love" had Joanie—who had developed a crush on Potsie—falling asleep and dreaming she marries him.

* British surreal comedy series ''[[The Brittas Empire]]'' concluded with the revelation that the entirety of the programme, all 53 episodes, had been a dream. The title character had fallen asleep while on the train to the interview for the job that he'd had throughout the series. The other people in the dream (apart from his wife, who was the same in the dream and in real life) were actually people on the train with him, and he projected them into the dream.

* ''[[Star Trek]]'' as a whole has the "All Just a Holodeck Simulation" version.

'''B'Elanna:''' ''(seeing the helmsman, Kortar)'' He slaughtered my friends!

'''Klingon:''' No. He slaughtered the dream. He dragged you from the illusion of life. This is where you belong. }}

{{quote|'''B'Elanna:''' Look at this -- The eleventh tome of Klavek. It's a story about Kahless returning from the dead ''still bearing a wound from the afterlife''. A warning that ''what he experienced wasn't a dream''. The same thing happened to me!}}

* ''[[Life On Mars]]'' makes use of this, both as (seemingly) the circumstances of the main character (in a coma, dreaming the entire thing), and side instances where Sam wakes up in bed after being harangued by the [[Creepy Child|Evil Test Card Girl]]. Not to mention the fact that... {{spoiler|in the end Sam's adventures in the past turn out to be just a dream. One Sam ''commits suicide'' to get back to... if you believe that interpretation of the ending instead of [[Epileptic Trees|one of the dozens of others]].}}

* In the ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' season 6 episode "[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Recap/S6/E17 Normal Again|Normal Again]]," it is suggested that the entire series is a [[Cuckoo Nest|hallucination of the main character]], who is living in a mental institution and has power fantasies of saving the world with her imaginary friends. The episode's end leaves room for interpretation as to which existence (Buffy's life as a vampire slayer, or her life as a mental patient) is really All Just a Dream. [[Word of God|Joss Whedon]] [[Mind Screw|has outright stated that either one is a definite possibility]].

* The first episode of ''[[Terminator]]: [[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' starts out this way. Just so you know. Also, in the second season episode "Some Must Watch, While Some Must Sleep", Sarah is taken captive and interrogated by a man she had killed in an earlier episode. It is then revealed that this was in fact a dream, and that Sarah was admitted to a sleep clinic, because of her insomnia. She keeps having this dream, while she suspects something bad is going on at the sleep clinic. {{spoiler|Eventually, we find out the sleep clinic was in fact the dream, induced by the drugs given to her by the man who abducted her, for real - him having survived the earlier episode against the odds.}}

* Likewise at the end of ''[[The Young Ones]]'' episode "Interesting" where Neil experiences something similar as he is about to be kicked in the head by skinheads.

* ''[[The Twilight Zone]]''

* Used rather drastically on ''[[Seinfeld]]'' when, after Kramer persuades him to get an illegal cable hookup, Jerry dreams that he is graphically gunned down by the FBI. Then he wakes up and discovers the plane he's on is about to crash, which is real.

{{quote|"What have you done to my little cable boy?!?"}}

* Also done on ''[[Mad TV]]''. It begins with the children of an elderly couple shocked by their parents' dirty dancing and ends with Stephnie Weir waking up from a dream "about a skit that has no ending".

* In ''[[Hannah Montana]]'' Jackson and Lilly end up dating after Miley tries to sabotage it. At the very end, despite it being a fairly normal story line and not all that much changing, it still turns out to be a dream.

** It also appears in another episode. When Frasier meets a supermodel-zoologist on an airplane, he comments that "This is usually the part where I wake up." Cut to Frasier opening his eyes - [[Subverted Trope|and the camera panning out for a]] [[Bedmate Reveal]].

* ''[[Roseanne]]'' essentially ended the series with a version of this.

* At the end of the fourth season of ''[[Oz]]'', Tobias Beecher is up for parole. His lawyer enters the room and tells Beecher the Parole Board have approved his release. Everyone cheers as he returns to Em City, and a last minute assassination attempt by the Aryans is barely averted. Beecher is then shown walking out into the sunshine (showing the exterior of Oswald Prison for the first time) then playing with his daughter and new girlfriend in the park. Then he wakes up in his cell, and we flashback to his lawyer telling him that the Parole Board did ''not'' approve his release.

* One episode of the Charlie Drake [[Britcom]] ''The Worker'' has the title character experiencing an increasingly surreal series of events which culminate in his arrival at a TV studio, where it turns out that he's the leading actor in a TV [[Sitcom]] called ''The Worker''... Drake liked this plot so much he reused it in a later episode. A more conventional use of the trope occurs when the Worker gets hit on the head by a boomerang and has a surreal dream about Aborigines (possibly inspired by Drake's earlier comic song "My Boomerang Won't Come Back". Except this time it did).

* The pentultimate episode of ''[[Without a Trace]]'''s third season does this, as {{spoiler|Jack Malone}} is trying to deal with his demons.

* ''[[Kamen Rider Ryuki]]'''s Hyper Battle Video ends with this. For good reason too, since the Kamen Riders [[OOC Is Serious Business|were acting like a Sentai team]] and Ryuki wound up crossing over with [[Kamen Rider Agito]] to fight an [[Evil Twin]]. With those outlandish concepts, how could it ''not'' be a dream?

 

== Music ==

* Aaron Carter's upbeat song "That's How I Beat Shaq" relates the singer's adventures as he beats Shaquille O'Neal in a one-on-one basketball match, and ends with him waking up in bed. ("But if it was a dream, and it wasn't real... [[Or Was It a Dream?|how'd I get a jersey with the name O'Neal?]]")

{{quote|''Last night I had a crazy dream, I fell out of my bed! I missed the floor entirely, I fell through time instead!''}}

* [[Britney Spears]], "Baby One More Time". [[Fetish Fuel|What?]]

* [[REM]] , "Losing My Religion":

{{quote|''I thought that I heard you laughing

* Porter Wagoner/Tom Jones's song "Green Green Grass of Home" has the subject of the song seemingly returning home after being away for a long time, enjoying his return, only to wake up in prison awaiting his execution, only to return home dead and buried there.

* The Billie Holiday version, and most subsequent English-language versions, of "[[Driven to Suicide|Gloomy]] [[Brown Note|Sunday]]".

* Airbourne's "Blonde, Bad and Beautiful" turns out to be this, in a video that was [[Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll|filled with alcohol, stripping and a bit of pole-dancing]].

* The [[Barenaked Ladies]]' video for "Shoebox" is a dream of the girl who sneaks out on her date.

* The video for Live's "Run To The Water" turns out to be Ed Kowalczyk's dream.

* The video for [[Miley Cyrus]]' "Start All Over" is established as being a dream in the very beginning; it starts with her going to sleep and waking up in the dream world, and ends with her going to sleep in the dream world and waking up in the real world. [[Or Was It a Dream?|Then pictures she took while in the dream world start coming out of the printer.]]

 

* Certain branches of Hindu philosophy hold that because truth is unchanging, and the world is constantly changing, then the world is not real. Hence, [[Real Life]] is just a sort of dream state.

 

 

== Puppet Shows ==

* There's an episode of ''[[Adventures in Odyssey]]'' in which one of the children characters goes on an adventure in the Imagination Station (a virtual reality machine) that seems to be the same story over and over again, just set in different genres. At the end of the episode it's revealed the character is actually in a coma, reliving the events that put him in a coma, with the "bad guy" being Death coming for him and the friendly helper in his dream actually being a guardian angel trying to prevent an early death for him.

 

* Comedian Emo Phillips {{spoiler|inverts this trope when he}} talks about a dream he had. He describes a long series of really bizarre, Emo-Phillipian events, that ends with him getting knocked unconscious. "And that's when I had my dream...."

 

* ''Hecatomb'' had a literal "It Was Only A Dream" card which can eliminate practically any card your opponent has out, essentially making them have never happened.

 

== Theater ==

* Shakespeare played with this. Most of the main characters in ''[[A Midsummer Night's Dream|A Midsummer Nights Dream]]'' believe this to be the case (or they just decide to pretend it is). Then, in the final lines, Puck advises the ''audience'' to do the same if they disliked the play.

{{quote|''If we shadows have offended,

* Alan Ayckbourn's 1985 play {{spoiler|''Woman in Mind''. The entire play. From start to finish. Really.}}

 

== Video Games ==

* Conversed in ''[[Escape From St. Mary's]]''. Two teachers disagree on whether it's an acceptable ending for a story, and the wo turn to blows.

* Happens in ''[[SNK Gals Fighters]]'' for the Neo-Geo Pocket Color, specifically in [[Fatal Fury|Mai Shiranui's]] ending. Winning the tournament and the [[Plot Device|K' Talisman]], means somehow that she can now marry Andy, who appears just in time... {{spoiler|to "reveal" that he has been secretly a woman all of these years}}. Shocked, Mai [[Catapult Nightmare|awakes to reality]].

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* As does [http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/narbonic_plus/series.php?view=archive&chapter=29025#110861 this] ''[[Narbonic]]'' strip.

* The brief [http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=030707 "Magic Flap"] arc from ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' ends like this.

* Grace of ''[[El Goonish Shive]]'', [http://egscomics.com/?date=2007-05-23 goes through her first day of highschool] then wakes up disappointed that it was a dream but still hopeful the experience would be close.

* This happens twice in ''[[My Milk Toof]]'' with the episode of "villainous ickle" who goes around breaking everything and when they go fishing they fall asleep and dream of catching a fish.

* Happens every year in [[Rhapsodies]] with [[Cloudcuckoolander|Kevin]] getting shanghaied into helping with Santa's Christmas rush. This always ends with him waking up... Though occasionally there's a few details lying around to make the audience wonder.

* In [[Greg (webcomic)|Greg]], Greg dreams he's a swashbuckling slayer of beasts and a suave ladies man, too bad the reality is so different, [http://gregcomic.com/2012/02/23/world-of-gregcraft-page-14/ here].

* In ''[[L's Empire|Ls Empire]]'', the [[Zombie Apocalypse]] during the April Fools Day special was actually a movie directed by [[M. Night Shyamalan]].

 

== Web Original ==

1007. That whole Expedition to the Barrier Peaks? [[Dream Sequence]]. }}

* ''[[Cracked.com]]'''s "[http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/why-saved-by-bell-all-dream-conspiracy-theory/ Why 'Saved by the Bell' is All a Dream: A Conspiracy Theory]" explains why ''[[Saved by the Bell]]'' has to be an escapist dream of a character in ''Good Morning, Miss Bliss'' (the pilot that was retooled into ''SBTB''), using clues from the [[Expository Theme Tune]].

 

== Western Animation ==

== Real Life ==

* Some people believe that "real life" is really all just a simulation using technology that doesn't yet exist in real life/this simulation. This is based on the belief that technology is likely to get to the point of being able to perfectly simulate real life while making the subject forget real life while in the simulation and that since once this technology exists it will result in more virtual worlds than the one real one the odds are that this is a simulation and not real life.

** "Perfectly simulate real life while making the subject forget real life"? Why are we talking about ''[[The Sims]]''?

** An interesting counterpoint is the idea that [[wikipedia:Simulated reality#Relativity of reality|"real life" is a meaningless term]], since any reality must be absolute from the perspective of its inhabitants (if we are indeed simulated beings, this is still the highest level of nested realities we can exist in).

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Dream Tropes]]

[[Category:Script Speak]]

[[Category:Ind Ex Machina]]

[[Category:Older Than Feudalism]]